MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions)
- Date
- 1992 · confidence medium
- Place
- Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States
- Credited to
- Nathaniel Borenstein
- Field
- Communication
What it is
Building on Carnegie Mellon's Andrew Messaging System, Borenstein designed MIME as a cross-platform alternative that let email messages include different character sets and multimedia attachments. Formalized in several RFCs, its content-type specifications were later adopted by the HTTP protocol for the web.
The exact year of introduction is not clearly confirmed by the source consulted; the first MIME RFC (1341) dates from 1992.
What it led to
- Multimedia attachments and non-English characters in email
- Adoption of MIME content types by HTTP and the web
Built on
- Request for Comments (RFC)1969
- Andrew Messaging System (Carnegie Mellon)